The Secret Dead (London Bones Book 1) (12 page)

23

Zombies run to family when they’re in trouble. Malcolm said something about ‘brother.’ Maybe Adam was right. Maybe Malcolm wouldn’t go near his brother, but family means more than people think. I had at least two hours before I was due to see Ben’s mother. It couldn’t hurt to look up Neil Brannick.

If he was in thaumaturgical decontamination, the Lipscombe might have had dealings with him. I sat at my computer and switched to the ancient DOS-based programme that was the Lipscombe’s internal system and searched for Brannick.

After my PC took a few minutes to think about it, it spat out two Brannicks: Malcolm and Neil. I put an X next to Neil’s name, waited, and was finally rewarded with contact details.

He had a mobile number attached to his profile. I dialled the number, but it went straight to voicemail. I left a brief message and asked him to call me.

The short profile indicated he worked for Elior Services. I googled them and called the number on their website. The receptionist on the other end huffed at me the moment she heard Neil’s name, and I got the distinct impression I hadn’t been the first one to call. I explained to her who I was and that I wasn’t media, and after a significant amount of buttering up, she finally offered to pass on a message but couldn’t guarantee when he’d get it. The magical interference on-site made it difficult to get through.

‘He’s at work now?’ I asked.

‘Yes. I said I’ll pass on the message.’

His brother had just died, and he hadn’t taken the day off work. Maybe he was the type of person who needed to keep busy to keep his mind off things. It fit with what I knew about their relationship. Malcolm had never had a good word to say about his brother, although now that I thought about it, I couldn’t remember the specifics. It was all ‘my bloody brother,’ ‘that asshole,’ or similar. I didn’t think Malcolm had ever told me what the man had done to deserve the epithets.

I reached over and dialled Dunne’s number. I’d helped him out enough times. He could return the favour. A few minutes later I had the address of a magic spillage site in north London.

I took the overland then the Northern Line, which was not only miraculously working, but I actually managed to get a seat and avoid any delays. Outside Hendon station, I followed the directions on my mobile GPS.

Sometime while I’d been underground, the sky had changed from grey to the dirty yellow that means snow, but none was in sight yet, though it was still bitterly cold.

I smelt the site before I saw it. The burnt-sugar stench of magic got stronger and stronger until, after about a ten-minute walk, I found myself outside a long row of white construction boards stuck with posters advising ‘Warning! Thaumaturgical Damage. Entrance to authorised personnel only.’

Judging by the buildings on either side, the ones hidden within the hoarding were probably Edwardian terraces. Three of them, if the dips in the pavement indicated driveways.

I strolled along until I found the door at the end of the boards and hammered on it until someone poked his head out.

The head belonged to a bearded man in his early twenties: too young to be Neil Brannick. He leered at me, but there wasn’t much heart in it, just the requisite leer certain men give all women under sixty. ‘This is a restricted site, love.’

I showed him my Lipscombe ID, introduced myself, and asked to speak to Neil. He disappeared behind the door for a moment, and I heard him shout, ‘Boss! Some bird is here for you. Not a reporter this time.’

Neil Brannick turned out to be a greyer, wrinklier version of Malcolm, but where Malcolm was merely tall, Neil was a giant with the stooped shoulders and poor posture of someone who habitually ducked under doorways. ‘Yes?’

His hard hat and coveralls swarmed with moving protective runes and sigils. His right hand held a cigarette, the other was withered into a claw, the fingers melted into too-smooth skin.

I held out my hand. ‘Vivia Brisk. I’ve left a few messages for you.’

Neil looked at my hand and ignored it. ‘I’ve already spoken to the police. I don’t know anything about what happened to Malcolm,’ he said brusquely. ‘I’ve got work to do.’

He tried to push the door closed, but I was prepared and took a step forward and pushed it open with my hand. ‘Only a few minutes, Mr Brannick.’

I could see him thinking. ‘Fine, but you’ll have to follow me around. I’m on a schedule.’

‘Okay,’ I said, taking a step forward.

It wasn’t the answer he was expecting. Most people would rather cut off a hand than voluntarily go into a thaumaturgically damaged site: at least then you’d know what damage was going to be done. Raw magic could do anything.

Of course, if you were lucky, your hand might grow back.

Neil sighed. ‘This is a damaged site, darling. It’s not safe for girls. You might not come out the same shape you went in.’

‘That’s okay,
darling.
I’ll take my chances.’ His face darkened. ‘I mean, I should be fine,’ I said, reminding myself I’d come here because I wanted information from him. Pissed-off people don’t tend to be helpful. ‘I always carry protective gear with me. Risks of the job and all that.’

I pulled a battered robe from my backpack and draped it around my shoulders, its runes rippling as they detected stray magic in the air. The colours were faded after years of washing, and the end was frayed so it looked a little like I was wearing a raggedy old dressing gown—the type that you know you really should throw out but never will because it’s much too comfy.  Despite its threadbare appearance, Neil was enough of a professional to be impressed. Impressed with the robe that is, not me.

‘And how much did that set the taxpayer back?’

‘It doesn’t belong to them,’ I said, not a little snarkily. ‘It was a gift.’

It was, and if I ever got desperate, it’d sell on eBay for a fortune. I was tempted sometimes, but I’d rather be poor and human-shaped than a rich puddle.

‘Follow me.’ He splashed into the water.

I did and sank into dank water up to my ankles. Too late, I looked down to see Neil was wearing a pair of knee-high rubber boots. He waded through the deep water, now almost to his waist. I thought I heard him snigger.

Until today I would have bet that out of Malcolm’s family, Malcolm would have been the one I liked least. Turned out I would have been wrong.

The ruins of the terraces were still there, and the shapes of the half walls gave me a rough idea of where they had been. Dark moss grew in the cracks between the bricks, in some places hiding them all together. A single double-story wall, hung with flowered creepers, remained in the middle of where I guessed the terraces had been. As I watched, the creepers grew, flowered, died, and grew back again like a nature documentary on fast forward.

I sloshed through the water until I was standing beside Neil. ‘What happened here?’

‘Not sure,’ he said, pulling a cigarette from the top pocket in his overalls. ‘The neighbour on that side’—he indicated to the left with a nod of his head—’says his daughter was having a spat with the girl living in the middle. Prob’ly a curse got out of control.’

‘Any survivors?’

Neil shrugged and mumbled a little as he lit the cigarette with a match. ‘We caught some cat-bear thing. The thauromancer’s having a go at it. See if it’ll shift back. The family on the right had a poodle, so it could be that.’

Sweat trickled down my forehead, I wiped at it with one hand. I wanted to take off my heavy coat, but no way would I risk shifting any part of my protective gown.

Neil strode further into the swamp and began giving instructions to a small group of fluorescent-jacketed workers who were trying to shift a lodestone into the middle of the zone. A small digger-loader stood a few feet behind them, mired in the mud.

I raced after him, or would have if my feet hadn’t squelched with each step.

‘Mr Brannick, I need to speak to you about Ben.’

‘What about him?’ Neil turned his back against the lodestone and heaved. It didn’t budge.

‘Do you know where he might have gone?’

‘No.’ He stalked off through the water. I followed.

‘Are you sure? Anything you can think of might help. We’re very concerned about him.’

‘Uh-uh. You said you were Lipscombe?’

I nodded.

‘So what’s wrong with you then?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Bullshit.’ Neil snorted. ‘No one clean works for the Lipscombe.’ He stopped at a metal container painted with runes and pulled open the top, then gestured to the workers, who grabbed tools and sloshed back to tackle the lodestone again.

‘Your brother did. He was fully human as far as I know.’

‘Not for lack of wanting. Now he’s got something extra. Congratulations to him.’

Having your body decompose around your still-thinking brain while you tried not to eat your family wasn’t cause for celebration in my book. I tried to get the conversation back on track. ‘But Ben—’

‘Ben’ll be fine. He might get himself into trouble but nothing he can’t get out of. The boy’s not right in the head. You mark my words, the kid’s feral and violent. He saved Malcolm from the pit, sure, but he wouldn’t let Malcolm bite him. I know what you’re thinking. “The boy’s fourteen. He’s so skinny, so little.” He’s not skinny, he’s wiry. There’s nothing but muscle there. And he’s tough as old socks. Annie lets him run wild up on that island. The boy hunts and kills and eats what he catches raw. He’s not some soft little city boy. You know how I know this? He killed Adam’s dog a few years ago. Ben was five and he skewered it with a garden fork. Had no idea what all the fuss was about.’

The image didn’t fit with the one I had, but I couldn’t help thinking of the rabbit meat that was not.

Something slithered over my shoe under the water. I tried not to imagine what it might be. Probably one of the previous inhabitants of the houses. Or the poodle. I thought of the skinny back I’d seen behind the huge wings, and the quiet, withdrawn boy. I shoved Jillie’s words to the back of my head.
Rabbit meat
. She was wrong. Neil was wrong. I didn’t think Ben was dangerous, and I said so.

Neil snorted again. ‘Well, you’re not going to last long in the big city.’ He turned away and made some sort of gesture at the workers struggling with the lodestone so that they let it fall with a splash into the water. He gave me an appraising look. ‘Not sure why you care so much. Let the NRTs handle it. Or are you one of Malcolm’s special friends?’ He flicked the end of his cigarette into the brown water. ‘So are you scaley or furry? Malcolm definitely had a preference for either one or the other.’

More and more offensive. ‘Neither. Look, do you have any idea where Ben might have gone?’

‘No.’

‘Please. I don’t have anything else to go on, and whether you like him or not, the boy is only fourteen and at risk from any nutjob out there.’

Neil laughed nastily. ‘Good luck to them. The boy’s an abomination.’

I gave up my attempt at being nice. ‘That’s an awful thing to say about anyone.’

Neil turned to face me. His face was black with anger. ‘The boy
is
an abomination, and thinking that doesn’t make me a nutjob. It makes me someone who knows what the hell is going on in this country. You think I don’t notice?’ He jabbed a finger at my collarbone. It hurt more than I would have expected. ‘You think I don’t see? All this? I’ve spent my career cleaning up after you lot. You put this shit on the internet where impressionable girls can see it and think a little curse is a good idea. You make it all look so normal. Hell, you claim it’s normal to be an aberration, and the kids listen. They think it’s okay to be a demon.’

Save me from the rabidly pro-human.
I wondered how much his viewpoint coloured his view of Ben. On the other hand, normal children don’t kill dogs. Neil stopped and grabbed my arm. His crew was staring at me.

‘We’re finished with this conversation. Get out.’

He pulled me through the manky water, and I let him. I didn’t think I’d get any more information out of him. I doubted Ben would have run to his kindly uncle Neil. Not if the boy had a jot of sense.

Neil unlocked the site door, then lifted his arm to shove me through. I grabbed his arm before he could do it. Red hot anger coursed through me. I hate being manhandled. As far as I’m concerned you can believe what you like, just don’t be an asshole about it.

I said, as politely as I could through clenched teeth, ‘Ben might be a danger to everyone in a few days if he’s been bitten. I doubt he would come to you, but if he does, you give me a call.’

I offered Neil one of my cards. He ignored it, so I tucked it in his overall pocket behind his packet of cigarettes. Out of the corner of my eye, as I walked away, I saw him take it out of his pocket and drop it on the ground.

Litterbug.

24

I took the train to King’s Cross to meet Ben’s mother, still fuming after my meeting with Neil, and uncomfortable in squelchy shoes and damp trousers. I then took two wrong turns before I found the right hotel and was in a veritable grump when I arrived.

I’d like to say the hotel looked good when it was built, but some architecture looks rotten from the beginning. This was one of those: grey and grubby, the sort of place you went when you had no other options.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Ben’s mother. Other than Ben, I’d never met any of the other winged. Not many people had. I was aware they used the services of our Inverness office on occasion, but that was only when they couldn’t avoid dealing with the outside world. Mostly they kept to themselves on the island.

Annie Laradus made me hold my ID up to the peephole and then back away so she could get a better look at me. Finally, a bolt scraped away from the door, and I got my first look at her.

She was as crumpled as an old grey flannel left rolled into a ball to dry. Her mouse-coloured hair was scraped back, but frizzy split ends escaped and framed her face. If I’d seen her in the office, I would have assumed she was one of the occasional homeless who wandered in for a cup of tea and commiseration. Yet the woman in front of me couldn’t have been older than her early thirties because I knew she had been only eighteen when she became pregnant with Ben. She wore a large beige coat, with only the tips of her wings visible beneath the hem. To the casual observer, she would have appeared to have had a bad hunchback, and I wondered how much of her slump was deliberate.

As I considered her, Annie’s pale eyes appraised me in return. I obviously came up wanting, but not because of my damp trousers that still stunk like swamp water and my trainers covered in mud.

‘I wanted a sniffer. You’re not a sniffer. You’re a hag.’ It took a moment for my brain to process the words. Her accent sounded almost Scottish, but it was Scottish with a drawl, as if someone had recorded a Scot and then played it on a tape recorder with dying batteries.

‘We don’t have one. It’s just me.’

The crumpled woman sighed and held the door open just enough for me to get inside. I caught a whiff of old potatoes as I squeezed past her.

‘Cup of tea?’

‘Please.’

The inside wasn’t any better than the outside, although the peeling burnt orange wallpaper might have been fashionable once. The room was small with a single bed, a cracked leather armchair, and a single square coffee table ringed with mug stains. A
Metro
newspaper with a picture of Ben on the front page lay on the table. An empty sandwich box sat next to it.

Annie tottered off towards a kettle on the table beside a small chunky television.

‘Do you mind if I use the bathroom?’

She shrugged, which I took as a yes.

I changed out of my jeans and into the spare pair from my backpack but couldn’t do the same with my trainers. I rinsed the mud off under the tap. It didn’t make them that much wetter, but it was no longer obvious I’d just waded through a swamp.

How unprofessional would it be to return to the room in socked feet? Too much, considering the woman was missing her son. I wedged my feet back into the wet shoes.

There was a cup of tea in a plastic hotel mug waiting for me when I exited the bathroom. She hadn’t asked if I’d wanted sugar, but by the taste of it she must have spilled in the entire bowl. I took a sip and struggled to hold back a grimace.

‘Is it all right?’

‘Yes, lovely.’

Annie perched on the edge of the armchair, her hands curled around an old mobile phone which she turned round and round in her fingers. Her nails were bitten down enough that the tips were swollen and red.

I took the only other possible seat, on the narrow single bed. A stuffed canvas bag was wedged between the bed and the wall. It looked like one of Stanley’s—First World War army issue. It had never occurred to me the winged might have fought in the war, but thinking about it, I couldn’t see the government letting the opportunity for winged spies passing them by. I wondered how much the war had diminished what was already a tiny population, if it made a difference to their imminent extinction.

Centuries-long persecution, combined with a physiology that lent itself to a high maternal death rate, meant that the remaining winged population were too few and too old to be a viable population. I recalled a documentary where they’d demonstrated the difficulty of getting a winged child through the birth canal. It was enough to make me shudder and want to clamp my legs together. As far as I knew, Ben was the only winged under thirty. They’d be gone in a couple of generations.

The woman sitting in front of me was one of the last of her kind. She wrapped her arms around herself, as if she needed consolation.

‘He’s in a lot of trouble, isn’t he?’

‘Yes.’ There was no way to cushion it. ‘We can help get him a good solicitor, and our legal advisor thinks if we can get him to hand himself in, Ben might be able to avoid a custodial sentence.’

‘Oh,’ she said in a small voice. ‘I don’t think I can afford a solicitor.’

I put the tea down on the scarred coffee table. ‘Don’t worry about that now. We can apply for legal aid. There might be someone willing to take it pro bono. We need to find Ben first. Let’s concentrate on that.’

She nodded. Her fingers reached up to a cross around her neck and rubbed it in an unconscious movement.

‘Do you have any photos you can give me? The more recent the better.’

She dug in her coat pocket and produced a small pack of Polaroids tied together with an elastic band. I flipped through them; each was a head shot of Ben against a stone wall. He was aged around only two or three in the first, then grew steadily older. In the last, he’d been caught in the middle of a teenaged eye roll. He looked like his father: dark eyes, sharp nose, wide mouth, although Malcolm was missing the mop of curly hair.

‘I take them every year on his birthday. I’ll want them back.’

‘I’ll make copies. When’s his birthday?’

‘Um, 4 November.’ Only just fourteen, then.

‘Does he have any friends in London he might have gone to?’

I wasn’t surprised when Annie shook her head. ‘He’s only here two weeks a year. The only people he knows are Malcolm and his family.’

‘What about your family? Are any of the other winged in London?’

She hesitated. Her washed-out eyes met mine. ‘Not really.’

‘Not really?’

‘None of the people like to leave the island. Ben and I are the only ones who do so regularly.’

‘But?’ There was a but. I could hear it in her voice.

‘There’s only one of us in London. He left the island years ago and never came back. He doesn’t keep in touch, and I wouldn’t know where to find him. Ben certainly wouldn’t.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Drew Gillies.’

I made a note of the name anyway. A man with wings would stand out. It shouldn’t be too hard to find him.

Annie’s little finger came up to her mouth, and her teeth made a little snick sound as she worried at the nail.

I looked around for a coaster for the mug, but there wasn’t one. I placed it on the newspaper instead.

‘Annie, did Ben bring rabbit meat down with him?’

‘What?’

I repeated the question, thinking it didn’t sound any less odd the second time round.

‘No, no, he didn’t. Jillie tore a strip off him last year because he brought a box of fish. Too smelly or something. Why do you ask?’

‘Just trying to get an idea of his movements.’

Ben had arrived two weeks before Christmas when Malcolm was definitely still alive, and Berenice Nazarak likely was too. If he’d killed her, he couldn’t have pretended it had come down with him. It would never last that long unrefrigerated. And Malcolm had certainly been alive when Ben had arrived. I tried to remember exactly what Jillie had said. Had Ben given it directly to her? Or had Malcolm told her that was where the meat had come from?

I left Annie staring at the phone in her lap as if willing it to ring. I asked her if she wanted to join me in looking for the youth club Jillie had mentioned, but the winged woman shook her head.

‘This is the hotel I always stay in. I don’t want to be out if Ben knocks on the door.’

I considered telling her not to open it. The chance remained that Ben had been bitten, but I didn’t think she would listen to me either way. He was her son, and she was going to open the door for him, ravenous dead or not.